BBC
2 January 2008
Oh Come all Ye Faithful
Pedant and Insightful
Oh Come Ye, Oh Come Ye to Wednesday Night.
Come and be clever, on your fav’rite subject
Come comment on the world scene, oh, come share the news you hear
Come comment on the world scene , come allay our fear.
We had planned for a lighthearted look at the forthcoming year, whilst exchanging good wishes, but as the news of the past week has made the lighthearted part of that option inappropriate, we offer instead a menu that must inevitably include the tragic events in Pakistan and Kenya, a last-minute forecast of the Iowa primary - and the intriguing prospect of a run by Michael Bloomberg as an Independent -, the G8 under Japan’s chairmanship, and the UN Security Council with Libya as Chair, not an altogether reassuring situation.
We are very pleased that Olivier d’Auriol will again be with us from Lausanne (His last visit was in June 2007). His perspective as a Swiss and as the manager of a fund of funds of funds will no doubt add some new dimensions to the somewhat dismal economic forecasts (U.S. economic forecast for 2008: Bleak), including the speculation that a slowing U.S. economy will cause the U.S. dollar to continue its decline against the euro. Possibly he will also comment on the woes of USB in the wake of the subprime crisis.
In the plethora of economic forecasts of major economies, only the outlook for China is upbeat (People’s Daily editorial forecasts 2008 key year in China’s history)
Whither Canada in all of this? The IMF certainly isn’t bullish, but the Globe & Mail panel of economists, while “showing more signs of anxiety than in previous years” seems to believe that the U.S. economy will start to overcome its difficulties by the middle of 2008, and the rest of the industrialized world (meaning, we presume, Canada too) will then rebound in tandem with the United States. The National Post bears out the gloom and doom with its story: The bears on Bay Street now outnumber the bulls, according to a late-year survey of Canadian investment managers.
Meanwhile, is there cause for rejoicing over the cut in GST? Most comments we have heard reflect Wednesday Night’s opinion that there is little benefit to any but the high-income consumers who won’t care much anyway.
Whither Canada politically? Dare we say, anyone’s guess?
We look forward to your comments, predictions, idle chatter - NO, NO, Wednesday Night chatter must never be idle, but should always be entertaining.
We look forward to seeing you.
Diana & David
News & Reviews you may not have seen
Parliamentary elections in Pakistan scheduled for Jan. 8 have been postponed by the government until February, the secretary of the Election Commission said Tuesday.
While from our perspective this would appear to be a sensible decision, given the disarray in the Pakistan Peoples Party, it seems that opposition parties, including Bilawal Bhutto and his father, the new co-leaders of the PPP, were pressing for the vote take place as originally planned. In our view, rather than helping the democratic process along, the results of an early vote would be even more subject to suspicion and recriminations. We are not impressed by the argument advanced by “opposition party members and Western diplomats [that] the decision to push the election into February was largely intended to deprive the two main opposition parties of a huge sympathy vote after Ms. Bhutto was killed on Thursday.” A sympathy vote is not exactly the best basis we would suggest for good government.
A related topic is the government’s astonishingly amateurish attempt to falsify medical evidence and lay the blame for Benazir Bhutto’s death on a lever on the sunroof of her vehicle as she ducked down. It was inevitable that an amateur photographer would produce documentation to the contrary.
Cleoo Paskal has forwarded a fascinating and thought-proving analysis Why Benazir Bhutto posed a threat , which we urge all to read: “On Nov. 7 this columnist wrote that Pakistani politician Benazir Bhutto’s election plans were likely to fail ‘if she survives’. The skepticism over her longevity was because of the threat she represented to both the Punjabi component in the Pakistan army and to the continuation of the military’s monopoly over state power.” More
Alas, poor Kenya!
The turmoil in Kenya since last Thursday’s vote was unexpected (at least, by us). As the team of observers from the European Union said, the Electoral Commission of Kenya (ECK) had failed to ensure the credibility of the vote, President Mwai Kibaki has had himself sworn in, riots have errupted amidst dire predictions that the apparent vote rigging could drive one of Africa’s most stable countries into tribal warfare. The news and analysis bears out this bleak possibility.
(RCI) A joint African-United Nations force took over peacekeeping duties in Darfur
on Monday. But the force of 9-thousand soldiers and policemen is only a little larger than the beleaguered African Union peacekeeping mission it replaces. It will take months to build up to its planned strength of 26-thousand. Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir long resisted western demands that he accept a UN force. But in June he accepted a compromise deal for deployment of a “hybrid mission” of mainly African troops.The Darfur conflict has pitted ethnic African rebels against the military of the Arab-dominated Khartoum government. Arab militias allied to the government, known as janjaweed, are accused of a campaign of atrocities against ethnic African civilians, razing villages and raping women.What if Iowa Settles Nothing for Democrats?
DES MOINES - Iowa is packed with presidential candidates and hundreds of campaign aides, advisers and contributors. Twenty-five hundred representatives of news organizations have been granted credentials to cover the caucuses Thursday night, twice as many as in 2004. Rarely has a political event been so intensely anticipated as a decisive moment, at least on the Democratic side. But what if it is not decisive?
The New York Times coverage of the candidates and issues is well worth bookmarking.
Anyone who shares our distrust of Rudy Giuliani as the Republican presidential candidate must read the piece on his business dealings in the December issue of Vanity Fair
Bloomberg for President? Now this is fun - much more fun than the slate for either party and is even attracting attention abroad Bloomberg tempted by open race for the US presidency as well as at home
see also Hillary Clinton | Barack Obama
election-guide/2008 Obama 940 37.6% Edwards 744 29.7% Cliton 737 29.5%
Japan is to propose the fight against global warming as a main discussion topic at a Group of Eight nations summit later this year.
The Japanese government takes over the chairmanship of the G8 group of industrialised nations on 1 January. It also wants to discuss at the summit development in Africa, high oil prices and preventing nuclear proliferation.
In the continuing discussion and debate on climate change, we offer this from the Economist:
Molten iron raining down like cowpats; ice floes at New Orleans. The weather of 1783 was an extraordinary case of sudden climate change driven by atmospheric gases
As noted above, Libya takes over the Chair of the UN Security Council. This should prove to be more than interesting in light of recent comments from the special representative of the NATO secretary-general on the absence of Arab and Islamic nations from the reconstruction of Afghanistan.
Passing of an era: Netscape Navigator, the world’s first commercial web browser and the launch pad of the Internet boom, will be pulled off life support Feb. 1 after a 13-year run.
When Olivier was last with us in June, one of our topics was the ‘One Laptop Per Child project’. By curious coincidence, it is back in the news this week with a report on the successful introduction of 50 of the ‘little green laptops’ to a hilltop Andean village, where primary school children got the machines six months ago.
Comment Number: 2 January 1, 2008 at 5:01 pm
Africa aid wiped out by rising cost of oil
We look forward to your company.
Diana & David Nicholson
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Comment Number: 1 January 1, 2008 at 2:57 pm
The rising cost of oil has wiped out the benefits many African countries were expecting from western aid and debt relief over the past three years, new research from the International Energy Agency has shown.
The situation is raising fears that, in spite of the strong growth many African countries have seen in recent years, there could be a repeat of the 1980s’ debt crisis in the developing world that was caused in part by the oil shocks of the 1970s.
dtnicholson@wednesdaynight.net
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